Grow Sales With 3 Easy Ecommerce Marketing Automation Tactics

Ecommerce marketing automation, if done correctly, is a great tool to efficiently and effectively acquire and nurture customers. With the advancements of big data and machine learning, you can give customers an outstanding personalized experiences without having to hire a large marketing and sales team to do so.

Businesses that use ecommerce marketing automation to nurture prospects experience an increase as high as 451% in qualified leads. In turn, nurtured prospects make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured ones.

For this article, we asked for expert advice from Beeketing – a Marketing Automation platform for ecommerce. Lori, a growth specialist and content enthusiasm at Beeketing, put together three proven marketing automation tactics for effective lead management and prospect nurturing in ecommerce.

Benchmark Your Marketing Channels

Find out how your store compares with your peers in customer acquisition.

Email marketing – the oldest form of digital marketing, is also the biggest are for marketing automation. When combined with advanced segmentation features, email marketing can deliver highly-targeted, personalized messages to your customers at the right moments.

Welcome email

Welcome emails are the digital handshake between you and your customers.

According to Entrepreneur, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue per email than promotional emails. They also generate 86% more unique open rates, 196% higher unique click rates and 336% more transactions.

Make sure that your email is timely, actionable and engaging so that you can get the best out of the welcome emails sent out.

Cart abandonment email series

Cart abandonment rate is a frequently overlooked sales channel. 70% of customers abandon their shopping carts without making a purchase, but 63% of them would be recoverable with a simple Cart Email Series.

Cart abandonment emails are a popular tactic to remind customers of what they left behind and guide them back to your store to complete the purchase.

You should be sensitive about the timing and frequency of these emails. Some important things to take note:

Remember to add a Call-to-action button into your email to let customers know what to do and redirect them to their abandoned cart to complete the purchase

Offer an incentive to encourage them to take action

Add urgency and scarcity into the email to boost conversions

Sales nurturing email series

Thanks to customer segmentation, which is one of the best features in automation marketing tools, you can easily divide customers into groups, such as:

Loyal customers

New customers

Customers who bought a specific product

Use this knowledge to send emails that are relevant to each segment, driving them to take the desired action.

Below are some campaign ideas to consider:

Get repeat customers by sharing product recommendations which are relevant to their past purchases

Reward your best customers with discount cupons

Show appreciation for your most loyal customers or biggest spenders by sending them a special incentive

Create an email or series of emails to encourage lapsed customers to return to your store or re-engage with your campaigns

Showcase your latest products or offer an incentive to potential customers who have signed up for your list but haven’t bought an item from your store just yet

#2. Automate Social Media Presence Without Killing Engagement

Social media is one of the best marketplaces for your business. A place for business owners to stay connected with customers, influencers, reach new leads and develop brand loyalty.

Having a rich and varied social media content strategy is a necessity, but generating and managing such content can be extremely time-consuming. In order to reduce your working time and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, automate your social media posts and monitor your accounts with tools like Hootsuite, Buffer andSproutSocial

With these tools, you can schedule your social media posts to multiple channels at the best times of day for maximum engagement.

However, remember to strike the right balance between automation and engagement. Do not just simply share links without context. Add personality, thoughts and comments to your automated posts and manually handle the interactions with your followers.

No customer wants to have a conversation with a bot. The involvement of human in social media is still essential for all businesses to remain relevant. Keep this in mind so you can reap tremendous results with social media marketing.

Also, it’s important to measure the performance of your posts. If they do not get enough attention, consider changing content; image; number of posts or schedule and test over and over again. Automation tools such as Revive Old Post and Buffer both provide you a huge amount of insightful data to analyze the performance of your posts. Take advantage of this feature to make an effective decisions for your social marketing plan.

Use the Compass Acquisition Report to measure the ROI of your social media efforts.

#3. Dynamically personalize product recommendations to boost average order value

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – Steve Jobs’ immortal words.

Personalized recommendations generated by marketing automation tools show customers items they would like, but are unlikely to discover themselves. They improve a visitor’s experience by offering relevant items at just the right time. And indeed, statistics shows that 86% of consumers indicate that their purchasing decisions are influenced significantly by personalization.

Big names like Amazon or Netflix are the live evidences of this tactic:

Product recommendation tools understand your visitor’s preferences based on their past behavior and the behavior of similar customers. Using recommendation algorithms, these tools can generate highly relevant recommendations to help customers discover products that are likely to match their interests.

There are plenty of places to display recommendations on your ecommerce website. For example:

Homepage: Since customers won’t look for anything in specific on this page, this should be a place for you to display your Best Sellers or Product Recommendations based on their browsing and purchase history

Product pages and Cart pages: Recommend complementary products based on what they are viewing in your product pages or what they have in their carts. This is an effective way to influence customers and improve average order value.

Conclusion

Use automation marketing tools responsibly, do not just set and forget. Those tools are made for you to efficiently execute your campaigns with less effort, maximizing profits.

Remember that content is still the most important part of any marketing plan and no tool can automatically generate this better than marketers themselves. The key point to have an effective ecommerce marketing automation strategy is to create content that doesn’t sound automated, making your messages sound as natural as possible. By doing this, you are able to drive sales at scale and grow your business without having to grow your marketing team.